I want to talk about something that I think is one of the most underrated skills of being a leader that is not talked about enough and that is decision making. If you really think about your job as a leader, a large difference between you and those you lead is that they spend more time executing, while you execute but also think/decide.

Ironically most of us never actually sit down and think about HOW we make decisions. We think about what we decided, we think about whether it worked out, but the actual mechanics of decision-making, nobody teaches you that. And yet it's probably the single biggest lever on how far you and your team go.

The quality of your decisions determines the quality of your results on your team/department.

So I want to walk you through a few things. Some of this is about how to make BETTER decisions in the first place. The other half is about what to do when you've already made a bad one, because that is just as important.

Making the Decision

First: stop accepting either-or mentality.

When someone brings you two options, "should we hire this person or not," "should we cut this program or not," your job isn't to pick an option. It's to ask one more question and find the THIRD door. There are almost never only two options, there's just whoever brought you the decision hasn't looked hard enough yet or put the effort into thinking about more options. That is where you come in.

Example: (very common client question) "should we open a second location or not?" Push back. Could you run a second shift out of the current space first? Could you test the new market with a smaller footprint before committing to a full build-out? Could you partner with an existing operator there instead of building from scratch? The binary is almost always hiding two or three better options.

Second: Decide WHEN you're going to decide. Here's what I've noticed in myself and in every leader I've ever coached: we procrastinate on the hard calls and make the easy ones first. But the reality is no decision IS a decision, you're just making it slowly and paying for the delay the whole time. What's worked for me is keeping a running list of decisions separate from my to-do list, and batching them into one sitting (often with Alex/Sharran or one of them) instead of carrying them around in my head all week. Making one decision creates momentum for the next one which is why this works insanely well. I also find I don’t make my best decisions when I’m in ‘execution’ mode, so I work hard to separate these times from each other.

And here is one I want you all to remember: you will never see a fast-growing, high-velocity organization built by slow decision-makers.

Never. Not once. Speed of decision-making is a direct input into speed of growth.

If your team is waiting three weeks for you to approve a budget change, sign off on a new hire, or greenlight a pricing test, that lag on the decision isn't neutral, it's actively capping how fast the business can move and degrading the trust your team has in you.

Third: when you're too close to something, advise yourself like you'd advise someone else. Alex calls this Solomon’s journal, I call it defusing from the decision.

Ask, "if a friend described this exact situation to me, what would I tell them to do?"

This is especially useful with people decisions, like when you're trying to decide whether to keep investing in a direct report who reminds you of yourself early in your career. You WANT to believe in them, so ask what you'd tell another leader in your exact seat.

Fourth: delegate the decision, not just the task. Handing someone a task builds a follower. Handing someone the authority to actually decide builds a future leader, which is part of our flywheel here at ACQ :) That means you have to raise your tolerance for mistakes, because people WILL get some (many) of them wrong.

Practical example: instead of telling your direct report which vendor to pick or exactly how to structure their team's comp plan, hand them the decision with a clear outcome you need and let them own the call.

Now - What happens after you've already made the wrong call

Here's the part that is not often talked about but NEEDS TO BE. Say you already made the decision, and it's NOT working.

Maybe you hired someone who's struggled in the role for months, moved them to two other positions hoping it'd work better, and it still hasn't. Or maybe it's not a person at all, maybe it's a vendor contract you signed a year ago that's underdelivering, or a marketing channel that's never once hit target CAC. At some point the data is telling you something, but you keep going anyway.

This is called escalation of commitment to a losing course of action, and it is one of the most expensive traps in business. Sometimes it costs you a few weeks, other times it costs you an entire year or the trust from your team.

WHY do we do this to ourselves? Two reasons, mainly.

The first is sunk cost. We are irrationally attached to the time, money, and energy we've already spent. Reality is: it's gone. It should have zero bearing on what you do next, and yet it drives most of our worst decisions. It's the same reason Blockbuster held onto a dying model for years past the point it made any sense, because they'd already built their whole ethos around it.

I see this constantly with leaders and underperforming initiatives: "but we've already spent six months building this" is not a reason to keep funding it. It's a reason to be honest with yourself SOONER next time.

The second is ego. None of us want to be the person who was wrong. So instead of cutting our losses, say, killing a product line, walking away from a partnership, admitting a hire isn't working, we quietly invest a little more, hoping it'll retroactively prove we were right all along.

So how do you actually catch yourself doing this? 3 things you can start utilizing.

One, separate the decision-maker from the evaluator. If you made the call, you're biased to defend it, so get someone unattached to the outcome to look at the facts.

Two, hold yourself accountable to the PROCESS, not just the outcome. Set checkpoints up front, don't wait until the end to realize you should've known sooner. Winning behaviors eventually lead to winning.

Three, shift the focus off yourself. When it goes sideways, don't protect your ego, ask what your team needs from you right now. If you do what’s right for the business and team, results for yourself will follow.

I'd encourage every one of you to look at one decision on your plate right now, either one you've been sitting on, or one you've already made that you haven't wanted to revisit, and run it through this. This may have been too long but hey it’s what was on my mind LOL.

- Leila

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